On 01/10/2019 14:36, Thomas Mueller wrote:
It went in after NetBSD 8.x was branched so I'd guess it would be somewhere in the 8.99.xx versions. It is in the 9.0_BETA branch as well.Do you know when (what version) NCQ was introduced to NetBSD? Was it before or after 7.99.1?
The fact that the drives were deliberately designed to spin themselves down behind the back of the operating system and ATA driver meaning that the next time the OS tried to do an IO the operation would timeout and have to be retried after the disk had spun back up. This tended to trigger the type of fsbn errors you are seeing.What is atatctl? "which atatctl" shows nothing. Is atatctl part of smartmontools? I don't have smartmontools installed but could run it from the System Rescue CD or build in NetBSD (or FreeBSD or Linux?) on the Hitachi hard drive. Firmware or driver bug could explain why the Western Digital Green hard drive might be adversely affected but not all other hard drives. I believe Western Digital discontinued the Green hard drives because of technical or performance problems.
All the extra spin up/spin down cycles played havoc with performance and I think also took its toll on the drive electronics. The whole idea was fairly flawed as spinning up a drive uses more power than at any other time in drive operation so doing it more often costs power unless you are confident that the drive can be down long enough to offset that usage.
I thought they did finally produce a version of the firmware where you could at least turn that ridiculous behaviour off but I've no idea where you can find it. The other way to avoid it is to ensure the OS does a disk operation often enough to inhibit the spindown.
Mike